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When you’re already committed to playing a show on a low-ceilinged boat with stripper(?) poles and questionable stabilizers, you might as well take some risks musically, too. Last Saturday’s Rocks Off Concert Cruise with Garcia Peoples (recorded live by yours truly, natch) was a choppy-watered success, but I didn’t expect to be back on that boat quite so soon.

But the return of Ryley Walker to a New York stage (even if a floating one), coupled with the fact that his backing band would in fact be Garcia Peoples, was more than enough justification. If the weather outdoors was a bit more inconsistent this go round, the water presented fewer challenges and the vibes onstage were good as ever.

What we got here were two extended solo versions of “Summer Dress” (firmly back in the rotation, it seems) and “The Roundabout,” including an expanded take on Ryley’s hilarious Nick Drake imitation (practically daring him to turn this thing into an actual song). Walker looked strong and in command up there after a little time off, and in excellent spirits even when some rough water stumbled him away from the mic once or twice. After that set, the boat-tested crew from GP came and joined Walker for a thirty-five minute collab of psychedelia, drone, and other genres that Ryley’s Twitter will surely make jokes about this morning. The jam made an already-unusual show completely one of a kind, and yet another example of how with Ryley on center stage, you really don’t ever know quite what you’re gonna get.

Given the challenging acoustics of the boat, I recorded this set up close with Schoeps MK4V microphones in a mobile setup. That turned out to be a good decision — the sound quality is excellent. Hope you dig it!

Many bands struggle to display excellent musicianship when they’re standing on solid ground. An even smaller percentage can pull it off when they’re literally rocking and rolling on the second floor of the stern of a tourist boat. Garcia Peoples hopped aboard the Lucille, temporarily purposed for a Rocks Off Concert Cruise, and showed why they continue to be one of the most compelling live bands in New York today — even when they can hardly stand up straight.

You might think it hard for a band to compete with the obligatory water view of the Statue of Liberty and some unexpected fireworks over the East River, but Garcia Peoples know their audience. Hearing a jammer of a “Total Yang” (from their current release, Natural Facts) transition into the new “Hourglass” as the Manhattan skyline coasts by was a special treat, as was the brand-new song “Hotwire,” played for the very first time live on this boat. Sure you could stand outside and count the number of high-rise foreign money laundering residential towers going up all over the city’s central isle, but you’d have been a fool to miss any of the action indoors, made all the more special by the stand-in of our bud Hans Chew for the band’s often-keyboardist Patrick Gubler aka P.G. Six.

There were times during this set where things seemed sure to come unglued, through no fault of the band’s own — boat wakes can make for some rough water. But that was ultimately the one-of-a-kind thrill of this set — the added physical challenge of playing in this environment (even the audience did a lot of swaying and grabbing solid objects) makes you even more impressed with what these guys can accomplish.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK5 cardiod microphones and a limited soundboard feed. A boat isn’t the best place to jam from a standing-up-straight or sound quality perspective, but it’s still a good quality listen. Enjoy!

Thanks to Beyond Beyond Is Beyond and Garcia Peoples for making this happen!

Ryley Walker led off his March 2019 Union Pool residency with a shot of his usual self-deprecating humor, telling us he just got dumped and that this was his first show as a New Yorker (he’s lived here for months and performed quite a few sets here since). For those of us who’ve followed his career for the past five-plus years, we knew at least one thing to expect next: Ryley’s music is as serious as his stage persona is flippant.

Still, that couldn’t quite prepare us for the trio set with Steve Gunn and Ryan Jewell that followed. This trio could have done any number of things well, but what we ended up with reminded me tonally of Gunn’s collaborations with the drummer John Truscinski — with a hundred percent more guitar. Over the course of this 50 minute improvisational piece (titled by yours truly given the lack of a given one), I was struck by how, in the right hands, an instrument can be a person’s voice. Take Walker at his word — or put yourselves in the shoes of almost anyone who first moves to NYC from their hometown — and you knew what kind of energy he was working with: frenetic, exuberant and relentless. He played like a person aching to be seen, announcing themselves in an unfamiliar place. It wasn’t his first show as a New Yorker, but it might be the first one with that alchemical mix of awe, anxiety and urgency that turns you into the kind of person who belongs here.

Gunn’s trademark guitar tone undergirds the entire piece, a beacon for what’s to come. There’s a sweetness and calm to even Gunn’s noisiest work that’s of a piece to his own stage persona: confident but laid-back about it, extraordinary without overreaching. Like his recent guest appearance with William Tyler, this collaboration with Walker made for an incredible combination of peer guitarists operating at their creative and artistic peaks (not to say they won’t enjoy more). Likewise the conservatory-trained Jewell, an almost-constant among Ryley’s touring bandmates, who comes in and out of the foreground of this extended improv at the right moments, adding drone-style percussion at critical ebbs in the volume.

From his noise roots to his folk-leaning earlier albums to his wholly-new current material, Walker proves over and over that he refuses not to stretch himself artistically. It was hard to take photos of this show. You could get a clear shot of Steve, eyeing Ryley from stage left. But Ryley Walker, he was a blur, especially at this piece’s final, ecstatic climax. Like a true New Yorker, he never stops moving.

I recorded this set with a flawless feed from Union Pool’s engineer Doug Graham, together with Schoeps MK5 microphones at the soundboard. The quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Thanks as always to the artists and the Union Pool team for having us.

Boston cream was the theme of this twelfth and penultimate night of the Phish “Baker’s Dozen” series at Madison Square Garden. And if that offered two all-too-obvious musical groups in one donut flavor, Phish couldn’t avoid taking that bait, making a mashup of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” an early highlight of a show whose uneven moments were bested, in my view, by that ever-available fount of inspiration, the jams. If the first “Sloth” of 2017 excited more than a few heads, there was a killer “Gotta Jiboo” up next for the Saturday night crowd. That said, this was no Saturday night version–a sprawling jam that veered the song away from its upbeat, party vibe. If 2014’s “Plasma” isn’t the best-known song in the catalog, it certainly was one of the standouts of the first set, closing it out.

As has been the norm, the second set was where the fireworks were, virtuosity-wise. Kicking things off with a particularly languid version of “Ghost,” the band let that song take center stage as the night’s first huge jam song, followed by relative newcomer “Petrichor” and “Light.” After a “Lizards”>”The Horse”>”Silent In the Morning”>”Quinn the Eskimo” jam, there wasn’t much to be said. Nearing the end of curfew, the band wrapped with one of their more maudlin numbers “Joy.” If that song felt like a strange note to end on, with just one night of this epic MSG run left, it drove home the idea that with Phish, it’s best not to ask why.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK4V microphones in the center of the tapers’ section. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Since our last encounter with the band at the former Secret Project Robot space nearly a year ago, Oneida has released a stellar live album (of a different Secret Project Robot show), Secret Project Robot has become a slightly-less DIY, fully licensed, and even-more-enjoyable artist-run venue, drummer Kid Millions put out the best Man Forever release of … forever, and Oneida has nearly completed a brand-new album. Not a bad year’s work for guys who still have day jobs.

We’ve seen as many Oneida performances, collectively, as just about any band, so it’s hard to make a claim about one without offending one’s memory of another. So, I won’t throw inadvertent shade on those many other performances by saying this was the very best Oneida performance, but it was easily the very best I’ve seen in the recent past, made doubly exciting by the high volume of new tuneage (owing to that new album and all). The band has worked out many of these jams live at various other shows, but we haven’t been to one where they ripped through so many at once. Further, several of these were brand-new to us, including the one title-not-known-by-me song, “It Was Me,” “All In Due Time,” and “Lay of the Land.” A couple of those new songs offer a somewhat softer vibe than Oneida jams of recent past, with one of those unnamed numbers even billed as a “love song.” Just in case you thought they might go soft, Oneida made sure to play the storming “Cock Fight” next. By the time they made it to the final song, a nearly fifteen-minute “Cedars,” all I could think about was exactly how soon I could get my hands on that new record, and see Oneida next.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK4V microphones at the stage lip, together with a soundboard feed provided by our friends at punkcast. Other than a couple of occasional technical glitches in the vocal parts from the board feed, the sound quality is excellent. Enjoy! (By the way, if you want to hear an amazing, perfect-sounding Oneida live show, don’t be a cheapskate and go buy their live album. Trust us.)

Chris Forsyth’s appearance at Trans-Pecos a couple months ago heralded that most important of musical happenings: the possibility of a new release. With their latest No Quarter release The Rarity of Experience a proven success win fans, Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band used this intimate stage to show off some of their latest attractions. After hitting the ground running with “High Castle Rock,” we heard three new numbers in a row, including “History and Science Fiction” and “Mistaken the Bottle” (which we first heard at Union Pool back in late 2016) plus a new as-yet-unnamed (to us, anyway) number. When you add in “Dreaming In the Non-Dream I-II,” you’ve got a set chock-full of new material that continues to expand on Forsyth’s unique guitar vision, which blends a rock fan’s appreciation for shredding (he named a song after “Cocksucker Blues,” after all) with a Deadhead’s appreciation for sonic exploration, thematic variation, and little details. It’s always a treat to see Chris and the band, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on what’s next.

I recorded this set with onstage Schoeps MK5 microphones into a warm-sounding Aerco preamp, plus a soundboard feed. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Perennial Southern-rock favorites Widespread Panic have always been better than they had to be. If you go to many festivals that involve like-minded bands, you could be forgiven for getting one bluesy-sounding rock band confused with another. After the deluge of classic rock covers that comes your way, few of these groups really distinguish themselves, but they all get the applause.

Widespread has long been a different animal. Sure, the underlying vein of bluesy-rockness is there, as are some choice covers. But Widespread isn’t just playing the familiar — especially on their best nights, it’s their transcendent playing of both the familiar and their originals that makes them so special. If the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” or Talking Heads’ “Heaven” is one you’ve heard before, fine, but it’s hard to argue with the Widespread treatment of it, particularly the former. Here at Wanee Festival, Widespread were probably the main draw for a significant portion of the crowd, and they acted like they knew that, playing a finely-honed two-hour set that headed deep into the jam zone during an epic sequence of “The Last Straw”>”Mountain Jam”>”Impossible”>”Big Wooly Mammoth”>”Christmas Katie” and finally “One Kind Favor.” If there’s any upside to the reduced touring of Widespread Panic these days, it’s the fact that it makes each individual show a bit more special.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK4V microphones in a centered “forward of the board” position. If not quite as good sounding as the Trey Anastasio and Bob Weir sets, the sound quality is nonetheless excellent. Enjoy!

It was heartening to see The New York Times give such prominent billing to this Bardo Pond show, held at Maspeth’s somewhat-remote but welcoming Knockdown Center this past weekend. If the use of the phrase “noise rock” to describe the band was reductive in extremis, it at least got at the notion that Bardo Pond shows are loud, distortion-drenched, hallucinatory affairs. But give a listen to Under the Pines, which the band played in full at this show to celebrate its release, and vocalist Isobel Sollenberger features more prominently for much of this journey, at least compared to past pairing with the Gibbons brothers and Clint Takeda’s guitar attack. A vocalist is almost always a critical component of a band’s sound, of course, but it feels like Sollenberger is a more confident and featured presence than she’s been at any time in their long career.

We first saw many of these songs at the Three Lobed Sweet Sixteen show we recorded last year, and again at Union Pool in November, and they’ve only gotten sharper and better since. This full-album run through told the album’s story well, demonstrating both its cohesive flow and the diversity of sounds. “My Eyes Out” continues to be one of the more “pretty” songs in the catalog, while “Moment to Moment” continues to establish itself as one of the band’s most vital new long-form songs. In a rare treat (at least, not seen by us since the 2011 Death By Audio show), this set wrapped with the vital combo of “Don’t Know About You” directly into “The Stars Behind.” There’s no new tour information for the band yet, but expect a fun one once they return to the road.

I recorded this set about 10 feet from the left PA stack with Schoeps MK41V microphones and a soundboard feed. The characteristics of the room and the sound being amplified through the stacks (mostly vocals) mean the vocals are a bit more prominent in this recording than would be optimal. Nonetheless, it is an enjoyable listen!

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